Naked City

Even more than is usually the case, the new 5:4 Mixtape is a pure stream of consciousness. i’ve returned to a theme i explored in one of the earliest mixtapes, miniatures, once again setting myself a limit of music lasting under two minutes. With a shortlist of 100+ tracks (each one a personal favourite), i then simply followed my nose, treating them as puzzle pieces for a newly-created jigsaw, or perhaps more accurately as tessera for an eccentric aural mosaic. As usual, they embrace a mixture of new and old, and stylistically it’s all over the place, though its narrative was entirely suggested by the material, sometimes dovetailing or morphing, elsewhere successive tracks acting as rude non sequiturs. Along the way you’ll encounter abrasion (AlejandroJodorowsky, Naked City, Benjamin Wallfisch (whose IT soundtrack is gleefully insane), aTelecine), playfulness (Syd Dale, Andrew Liles, Camille), moody atmospheres (Laura Sheeran, Supersilent, Vangelis, Olga Neuwirth, Beacon, Gareth Davis & Machinefabriek, Alva Noto, Ben Lukas Boysen), edgy lyricism (Zola Jesus, Elsiane, Gazelle Twin, Clark, Jenny Hval), convoluted beats (Don Davis, Zavoloka & AGF, The Flashbulb, Derek K Jeppsen, Shad[]wb[]x, Ryoji Ikeda), drama of various hues (James Newton Howard, Peter Ablinger, Veli-Matti Puumala, Claude Vivier), dreamy ambient (Bad Loop, The Real Tuesday Weld, Cliff Martinez, Get Well Soon, Monty Adkins, Aphex Twin), rich tonal yum (Marcel Dupré, Carpenters, Cyrillus Kreek, Tõnu Kõrvits) and various other electronic, experimental or otherwise unconventional amuse-bouches (Francis Dhomont, Frank Zappa, Nicolas Obouhow, Andrew Lloyd Webber (yes, really), Sophie, Steve Levine, John Zorn, Kenneth Kirschner). And all of this in just one hour.

48 tiny tracks ranging in duration from 1’59” to a mere 26 seconds. Here’s the tracklisting in full, together with links to obtain the music. As ever, the mix can be downloaded or streamed via MixCloud. Read more

It’s time for a new mixtape, and once again it reflects my current predilections and listening habits. Film noir, and particularly its musical analogues, are much on my mind at present, so the new mixtape reflects that, drawing on 23 examples of muted monochrome. The similarities between these pieces are often very strong, yet the range of language used is considerable. The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, Tor Lundvall, David Lynch and This Will Destroy You opt for heavy-laden music pulled by a sluggish pulse, throwbacks to the past from the cusp of an apocalyptic future. Tangentially related, Ulver, Demdike Stare and Asher find regularity in the artefacts that litter the surface of their hauntological materials. Gareth Davis and Frances-Marie Uitti, Aphex Twin, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) and Cosey Fanni Tutti and Philippe Petit all offer a kind of fin de siècle melodic scrutiny, while First Human Ferro, Access to Arasaka, Angelo Badalamenti and Sleepy Town Manufacture and Unit 21 grimly obsess over chord progressions, some fragile, some aching with nostalgia.Naked City go further by doing less, unable to move much beyond a bleak repeating chord, while Andrew Liles (remixed here by Jonathan Coleclough) is similarly inert, viscous music drifting slowly in a void. Johan Söderqvist, Deaf Center, Ben Lukas Boysen (Hecq) and The Stranger (Leyland Kirby) tease out the tacet malevolence ubiquitous within noir’s unique atmosphere. Jonathan Coleclough retreats into a despair of off-silent impenetrabilia, but the most substantial example of that comes at the centre of the mix. The apparent ‘absences’ in Rebecca Saunders‘ music are as significant and disorienting—if not more than—the sounds themselves, pulling the listener into a sightless struggle against, seemingly, reality itself.

Two hours of silhouettes and shadows; here’s the tracklisting in full: Read more

With noise is born disorder […] In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men. Clamor, Melody, Dissonance, Harmony […] when it becomes sound, noise is the source of purpose and power, of the dream—Music.

Stirring words from the opening chapter of Jacques Attali’s marvellous book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, and noise is the focus of the new 5:4 mixtape. As such, i suppose it could be deemed the least accessible of these mixes, although my interpretation of noise here extends beyond fortissimo walls of abrasion; there’s a lot more to noise than just that.

Three of Alva Noto‘s miniature renderings of computer files pepper the mix, blurring the distinction between active and passive compositional intent. To some extent, the same could be said of Richard James’ AFX track ‘Ktpa2’, one of a pair of ferocious static blasts that remain his most brutal music to date. Most of the tracks included here, though, are less single-minded than these, and drag a variety of æsthetic manners into their obstreperous orbits. Three Trapped Tigers (whose first album is one of this year’s most outstanding releases) explore a complex amalgam of math rock and glitch, while Ukranian soundscapists First Human Ferro put noise at the core of their paradoxically radiant dark ambient. Japanese experimentalist Lethe takes hard metallic field recordings in abandoned resonant spaces as his starting point, while Nine Inch Nails do what they do best tucked away deep in the bowels of a studio. Noise is a sine qua non of all music with a hauntological aspect, heard here in the hissy nostalgia of Black Swan and the searing, gritty glitter of The Stranger (in my view, Leyland Kirby’s most riveting persona). My own work the Ceiling stared at me but i beheld only the Stars is a large-scale conflict between noise and pitched material; the excerpt included here is from the centre of the piece, where bell-like pitches first emerge. One could hardly have a noise mixtape without Merzbow; i’ve included part of the opening track from one of his latest albums, a typically kaleidoscopic feast of electronic mayhem. At the end comes a fittingly curt signing-off by Thomas Bangalter, from his soundtrack to Gaspar Noé’s film Irréversible. Read more

Caught up as i am this Hallowe’en weekend in a flurry of horror movies, it seemed only right to make the new 5:4 mixtape suitable for the occasion. For this Hallowe’en mix, i’ve trawled my library for music that’s particularly unsettling—so don’t expect to hear ‘The Monster Mash’ or anything like that.

Not surprisingly, a number of soundtracks are featured, of very different styles and manners. The opening of Johan Söderqvist‘s score for Let the Right One In is a masterpiece of foreboding tension; Joe LoDuca explores rapid-fire percussive sounds in this nervy section of his music for the classic The Evil Dead (and the image on the artwork is a beautiful still taken from the equally beautiful blu-ray transfer of Sam Raimi’s brilliant Evil Dead II). Christopher Young draws on evocative metallic clangs and the ominous tinkles of a music box for his Hellraiser soundtrack, going to the opposite extreme for its sequel, Hellbound, the overture of which aspires to the operatic. Angelo Badalamenti—featured twice—establishes an almost immobile, horribly enclosed mood in his music for season 2 of Twin Peaks and, even more so, Mulholland Drive. The extreme, though, is Lars von Trier and Kristian Eidnes‘ soundtrack to Antichrist, one of the most unconventional ever created, and certainly one of the best. Jerry Goldsmith‘s score for Basic Instinct functions like a vast orchestral suite, often eschewing dramatics for music that slowly builds with masterly restraint; Thomas Bangalter—in a break from being one half of Daft Punk—accompanied one of the most horrific scenes of film violence with this ludicrously effective and queasy bit of sound; and David Lynch‘s own music for his exhibition The Air is on Fire is an impossibly deep and dark ambient cycle, occasionally—as here—introducing elements of hauntology. Read more